Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England

Karen Bamford, Naomi J. Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472462244
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317099390
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Though recent scholarship has focused both on motherhood and on romance literature in early modern England, until now, no full length volume has addressed the notable intersections between the two topics. This collection contributes to the scholarly investigation of maternity in early modern England by scrutinizing romance narratives in various forms, considering motherhood not as it was actually lived, but as it was figured in the fantasy world of romance by authors ranging from Edmund Spenser to Margaret Cavendish. Contributors explore the traditional association between romance and women, both as readers of fiction and as tellers of 'old wives' tales,' as well as the tendency of romance plots, with their emphasis on the family and its reproduction, to foreground matters of maternity. Collectively, the essays in this volume invite reflection on the uses to which Renaissance culture put maternal stereotypes (the virgin mother, the cruel step-dame), as well as the powerful fears and desires that mothers evoke, assuage and sometimes express in the fantasy world of romance.

PART I
Managing Maternity

Chapter 1
While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s “goodly storie” of Chrysogone

Susan C. Staub

In Religio Medici, Sir Thomas Browne longs for a “world without this triviall and vulgar way of coition.” Wishing that “we might procreate like trees, without conjunction,” he characterizes sex as “the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life”; there is nothing, he almost shudders, “that will more deject [a man’s] coold imagination, when hee shall consider what an odde and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed” (67). Browne is not alone among early modern writers in his queasiness about sex, and by extension, about human reproduction.¹ Labeling her “the Rib and crooked piece of man” (67), Browne’s “notion of woman is … limited to her procreative function,” according to Daniela Havenstein (qtd. in Swann 146). Thus in his desire for generation “without conjunction,” he seeks to bypass the fleshly maternal body. In The Faerie Queene, on the other hand, Spenser is preoccupied with reproduction, and he fills his epic with images of impregnation, pregnancy, and birth.² Yet he, like Browne, sometimes seems uneasy—if not repulsed—by the process, as several scholars have argued.³ In fact, his central myth of generation, that “wide wombe of the world” (III.vi.36.6) that is the Garden of Adonis, seems to anticipate Browne as he envisions a place where human reproduction to some extent replicates the life cycle of plants. But in a poem chiefly concerned with dynastic succession and the complications brought about by Elizabeth’s rejection of the maternal role, Spenser can hardly avoid such issues. As such, maternity, whether menacing or nurturing, almost haunts the poem, the work becoming, in the words of David Lee Miller, “a symbolic womb for the reproduction of an imperial ideology” (224).

Book 3 is particularly focused on maternity, especially on gestation and parturition; in many ways this section of the epic might take as its title the subtitle of the first English gynecological manual, Thomas Raynalde’s The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book (1545).⁴ Although it also has its share of cloying, perverse mothers, Spenser includes apparently affirming depictions of maternity in this book as well—from Venus’s search for the lost Cupid, to the impregnation of Chrysogone and birth of Belphoebe and Amoret, to Britomart, the mother of the Briton race, and finally to the Garden of Adonis, the poem’s mythic description of fertility and regeneration, a space that has been sometimes read as a privileged site of feminine reproductive power (Quilligan 191–4). Maternity is the matrix of this book, so to speak; “All flows from, to, and through the mother,” to borrow the words of Jonathan Goldberg (5). We can argue that the same held true for all early modern women since their identity and biological function were conflated in the term “mother,” a name for both the woman who produces and/or nurtures the child and the uterus. Yet despite the book’s interest in the wonders of the fecund female body, it, like other writings from the period, presents a vexed characterization of reproduction. This chapter considers how cultural ideas about maternity in discourse from two emerging disciplines, medicine and to a lesser extent, garden theory, provide insight into Spenser’s treatment of the maternal body in one episode: the birth of Belphoebe and Amoret. In looking at this scene, I link these two types of knowledge because I am struck with how often gynecological texts borrow from botany and vice versa. The maternal body is a garden, just as England and Elizabeth are. Looking at gynecological and gardening manuals from the period, I hope to contextualize this scene, showing how it works together with other epistemologies to assure masculine control and authority over the maternal body. These two types of writings stem at least in part from the same impulse: to understand and tame an unruly feminine wilderness.

In Spenser’s “goodly storie,” Chrysogone bears the twins by “straunge accident,” (III.vi.5.1–2) when on a sunny summer’s day, after bathing her breasts “with roses red, and violets blew, / And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew”—“the boyling heat t’allay” (III.vi.6.8–9, 7)—she lies down upon the grass and falls asleep. As she sleeps, sunbeams play upon her body, caressing her skin, evaporating the water droplets from her bath, and finally piercing “her wombe, where they embayd / With so sweet sence and secret power vnspide, / That in her pregnant flesh they shortly fructified” (III.vi.7.5–9). The interaction of heat and moisture depicted in the scene coincides with the theory of bodily humors still prevalent in the period which held that men were hot and dry (and therefore stronger and livelier, the shaping presence analogous to the sun) and women were cold and moist (weaker and more sluggish, the material to be vivified in the soil).⁵ At once mystical and sensual, the event is portrayed in broadly positive terms: “celestiall grace,” “wondrously,” “sweet” and “sweetest,” “sacred,” “miraculous.” In this seemingly idyllic scene, conception is figured on the landscape, Chrysogone the land that will sprout beautiful flowers after taking in the energy and nutrients provided by the sun.⁶ She becomes what Jonathan Sawday calls a “hortus anatomicus,” that is, “a natural landscape endowed with fertile corporeality” (219). But there is something disquieting in Spenser’s depiction, both in what it includes and what it omits.

The figuration of woman as landscape is traditional, and horticultural analogies abound in explanations of reproduction. Galen likens the womb to the earth, as does Paracelsus (Breur 328). Eucharius Rösslin’s influential and much translated midwifery book, The Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives, cultivates the analogy, likening the woman’s body to a garden both in his title and his prologue: “The name of this book is / The pregnant woman’s garden of Roses / In which you dig and pluck the herbs / Which have body, life / and soul on earth” (Arons 36). (The change from a generalized earth to a garden is important, and I shall return to the idea of the maternal body as garden later in this chapter.) Early modern medical manuals everywhere pick up on this analogy: “The earth unto all seeds is as a mother and nurse, containing, clipping and embracing them in her womb, feeding and fostering them, as the mother doth the child in her belly or matrix,” says Raynalde (186). Raynalde further compares conception to the sowing of corn and other seeds, explaining,

As ye may evidently see in the sowing of corn and all other manner of seed; so that there be, in all manner of generation, three principal parts concurrent to the same: the sower, the seed sown, and the receptacle or place receiving and containing the seed. If there be fault in any of these, then shall there never be due generation, unto such time as the fault be removed or amended. (186)

Helkiah Crooke likewise calls the womb “a fertil field” in his Mikrokosmographia (1615), explaining that human seeds are like the seeds of plants, their potential not activated “vnlesse they be sown and as it were buried in the fruitfull Field or Garden of Nature, the wombe of the woman” (271; Crooke’s text provides an especially provocative gloss on The Faerie Queene because Mikrokosmographia is so informed by Spenser’s poem. As Elizabeth D. Harvey convincingly illustrates, Crooke “‘incorporates’ The Faerie Queene in quotation and allusion throughout his vernacular anatomical treatise” [“Pleasure’s Oblivion” 55]).⁷ So ingrained is the trope that the title page to Mikrokosmographia portrays the female figure on the earth seemingly planted among the sprigs of grass that sprout around her; the male figure, flayed as if for scientific analysis, floats abstractly in the air. This analogy is even more vividly portrayed in gynecological manuals such as The Compleat Midwifes Practice (1656) and Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book (1671) that illustrate the fetus as a flower blossoming from the mother’s uterus. Such agricultural metaphors liken the female body to land tilled and tended by men: “when popular medical books made women’s reproductive bodies into agrarian fields, they were playing on at least two social facts. First, labouring men plowed these fields, making women the passive ground upon which men acted. Second, men of somewhat higher status owned that land, making women’s reproductive bodies equivalent to property owned by men” (Fissell 203). Even Sharp, who frequently challenges commonplace tropes, uses the analogy: “Man in the act of procreation is the agent and tiller and sower of the ground, woman is the patient or ground to be tilled” (32). In other places, where writers seek to explain why conception does not occur, the womb becomes a kind of hostile country—Scythia or Germany, for example, where the weather is too cold or wet for the seed to fructify (Raynalde 189). The masculine control of the fertile female land gets troped in other ways as well; at the beginning of his description of the organs of generation, Crooke compares the womb to a camp or a battlefield, images of land that more directly suggest conquest. In yet another configuration, Raynalde likens the development of the fetus in the womb to the transmutation of metals in the earth (45). Other botanical analogies were used as well. Menstruation is “the flowers,” and in Crooke, the hymen is “the flower of virginity” and “the cup of a little rose halfe blowne when the bearded leaues are taken away” (235).

Garden manuals reverse the trope, constructing the land as a female body fertilized and controlled by the shaping power of the male gardener. The gardener is the “Maister of the earth, turning sterrillitie and barraineness into fruitfulness and increase,” in the words of Gervase Markham (A3r). The idea that the man holds procreative power over the maternalized earth recurs in this literature. Hugh Plat in Floraes Paradise (1608), for example, praises the “true and philosophicall Husbandman” as “hee that knoweth how to lay his fallows truly; wherby they may become pregnant from the heauens, and draw abundantly that celestiall and generatiue vertue into the Matrix of the Earth” (8–9). Similarly, Markham speaks of the “almost infinite” power of the gardener, who through his “industry” and brainpower begets and brings forth heretofore unimagined “new garments and imbroadery for the earth” (110). Such discourse minimizes maternal power, coinciding as it does with embryological theory that limited the woman’s contribution in gestation to gross matter. The comparison suggests that both the land and the maternal body are resources to be husbanded and managed by their male owners. (Figures 1.1 and 1.2 below)

Despite its connection to traditional rhetoric, the Chrysogone scene is infinitely rich and has been variously interpreted: as a harmonious melding of Christian and classical elements, with Chrysogone’s pregnancy classified as a “happy predicament” (Quitslund 198); as a “natural miracle” with Chrysogone as a “Great Mother” (Goldberg 16–17); as “the embodiment of the Platonic idea” of virtue which is “the true genealogy of Christian virginity and marriage” (Roche 108); and as an allegory of the “basic forces essential to generation in human beings” (Broaddus 61), to provide a few examples on the positive side. More negatively, scholars read it as “politely periphras[ing] solar rape” (Berger 99); as a “fantas[y] of origin that struggle[s] unsuccessfully to minimize or even altogether to exclude the contamination of maternity” (Craig 16); and as part of a broader indictment of the womb as “a place where life emerges out of rot” (Miller 250). While these disparate interpretations might at first seem incompatible, in fact, they reflect the double view of the maternal body evident not just in Spenser’s poem but in popular conceptions of maternity from the period.

As Spenser continues his story, Chrysogone awakens, frightened to see “her belly so vpblone” (III.vi.9.8). Here, as if Titan’s rape of her were not enough, Chrysogone seems unable to comprehend what has happened to her (“Yet wist she nought thereof,” 7), and she flees into the wilderness in “shame and foule disgrace” (III.vi.10.1). Despite the fact that Chrysogone seems hardly present in this episode—she sleeps through it, after all—and Spenser here grants her very little subjectivity, curiously, she feels shame and the need to hide. Although the poet assures the reader of her guiltlessness (with a kind of ambiguity similar to that with which Shakespeare denies Lucrece’s guilt), he nonetheless describes the babies as an “unwieldy burden” (10.4) and depicts her escaping what he characterizes as sadness and oppression by falling asleep: “There a sad cloud of sleepe her ouerkest, / And seized euery sence with sorrow sore opprest” (III.vi.10.8–9).⁸ And just as she conceives unaware, so she gives birth unaware, her predicament assuaged by the assurance that “She bore without paine, that she conceiu’d / Without pleasure” (III.vi.27.2–3). Finally, after all she has endured, Diana and Venus appear and kidnap her babies while she sleeps, though Spenser presents the taking of the twins as a kind of protective sisterly empathy: “At last they both agreed, her seeming grieu’d / Out of her heauie swowne not to awake, / But from her louing side the tender babes to take” (III.vi.27.7–9) . At this point, she experiences narrative death, disappearing from the poem after the birth of the twins, her grief at the loss of her children anticipated but never shown since she never awakens from her sleep.

Figure 1.1 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, a description of the body of man. Engraved title page. Wellcome Library, London.

Figure 1.2 Illustration of a woman in utero: “Dissection to expose child in the womb,” The midwives book. Or the whole art of midwifery discovered. Directing childbearing women how to behave themselves. Wellcome Library, London.

The function of this scene, as Thomas Roche has shown, is to distinguish the birth of Belphoebe, Spenser’s type for Elizabeth, as singular and miraculous, even divine. In characterizing Belphoebe’s birth as “of the wombe of the Morning dew” (III.vi.3.1), Spenser echoes The Book of Common Prayer’s translation of Psalm 110:3, a verse that was usually held to refer to the Incarnation of Christ (105–6). With this analogue to the Incarnation, Chrysogone is thus connected with Ma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction Maternal Devices and Desires in Early Modern Romance
• Part I Managing Maternity
• Part II Voicing Maternity
• Index